


You're A Canary, I'm A Coal Mine

by commoncomitatus



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 09:53:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2617544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during "Corto Maltese". With the rest of Team Arrow out of town, the not-so-enviable task of dealing with Laurel's self-destruction falls to one woefully under-qualified tech nerd.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're A Canary, I'm A Coal Mine

*

They’re not friends.

Well, they’re not favour-friends, anyway. At least, not just now. Not at the moment. Maybe not ever, really, but ‘ever’ is a pretty long span of time, and it’d be kind of stupid to say ‘not ever’ (or even ‘always’, if you’re looking at the flip side), when it’s not actually about that kind of time-frame at all. Really, it’s just about this week. Not even just this week, really. Today, mostly. Or, well, this particular span of about three minutes. Which is kind of a short period of time, and definitely doesn’t count as ‘ever’.

Not that it matters, really. What will be will be, or so she’s always told herself, and whatever kind of uncomfortable _‘not exactly friends but not just acquaintances who share a common vigilante’_ thing they’ve got going on here, it’s all going to work itself out in the end.

They might get to be friends. Maybe. In a few weeks or a few years or when the universe stops throwing them both curveballs, they might get to like each other, might get to care about each other, might even get to be more than favour-friends. Secret-friends, even, the bottle-of-wine-and-a-sappy-movie kind of friends. Except, maybe without the wine. Bad idea, and probably a sure-fire way to never being friends with a reformed alcoholic. So maybe carton-of-orange-juice-and-a-sappy-movie friends instead, then? That’d work. Plus, well, Vitamin C is always good.

Anyway. Maybe one day, that’s a thing that could happen. The friends thing, the favour-friends thing. If they’re both smart and don’t play into the petty cliches of strong-minded women hating each other for no apparent reason. If they ever get to spend more than five minutes in the same room, or even just five minutes in a room that doesn’t also have Oliver in it (because, let’s face it, cute as he is, he’s about as much of a friendship murderer as the wine would be, with all that scowling he does). If they get a chance to know each other. It’s a whole lot of ‘if’, but if there’s one thing Felicity Smoak has learned in the last two years it’s that _‘if’_ has a curious way of turning into _‘when’_.

Not that she sees any of that happening in the immediate future, or at least not by the end of this conversation. It’s kind of unfortunate, but it is what it is. These things take time, and right now all they have is three minutes.

And that’s the other thing. Fact is, when it comes down to it, neither one of them are particularly easy to like, and that makes the work that much harder. Laurel is… well, she’s Laurel. Angry, bloody-minded, lawyer-smart Laurel, and she really doesn’t like being told what to do. She clashes with Oliver, clashes with her father, clashed with her sister so violently that Felicity can’t help thinking it’s a miracle they never came to blows. Or maybe they did; it’s hard to know anything for sure with the Lances, and Lord knows they all have a talent for not talking about stuff. Not that anyone tells her anything, anyway, even if they do tell other people.

Anyway. Point is, Laurel is Laurel, and Felicity kind of falls into the same category. Not the problem of being Laurel, of course, but the problem of just sort of being who she is, for better or worse. She talks a lot and doesn’t say very much, and she knows as well as anyone that it’s hard and a little frustrating for others to keep up with her. It takes a lot of effort to try and pick apart the useful stuff from all of the babble, and she knows that because sometimes it’s even hard for her and she’s the one babbling in the first place. Someone like Laurel, though, strict and professional and always on the go… she doesn’t have the patience to deal with someone like Felicity for more than a few minutes at a time; she’s inefficient, at least when it comes to getting her point across, and that makes communication really hard.

Felicity isn’t really big on talking to people. Laurel isn’t really big on being talked to. That’s a barrier that will be hard enough to get past all on its own, without all the other stuff getting in the way. And by ‘other stuff’, she means Oliver. Or, well, the bow-and-arrow parts of him, anyway.

It’s not that Laurel sees Felicity as a threat, per se; it’s just that she’s kind of always there, like Diggle and Roy. She’s part of the furniture just like they are, except in her case the furniture doesn’t stop talking. It makes it hard to adapt, she knows, hard for Laurel to find the peace and quiet she needs to find her place in this new corner of Oliver’s life. The whole situation, the awkward little _‘my ex-boyfriend who’s kind of also the ex-best-friend of my other ex-boyfriend (you know, the dead one) is actually the same hooded crazy guy that I kind of sort of maybe blamed for said other ex-boyfriend’s death’_ thing… it’s still really new to her, and she’s still processing it. It’s been a few months, sure, but Felicity knows from experience that it takes a whole lot more than a few months to really get to grips with a bombshell like that; truth be told, she’s still not entirely sure she’s got her head around it herself, and she has the benefit of A) two whole years, and B) not having Laurel’s ridiculously complicated history with Oliver in the first place. Nothing a few dozen pints of ice-cream a little therapy couldn’t cure; in a lot of ways, she had it easy.

So, yeah, she can’t really blame Laurel for being a little thrown, out of her depth and a little confused, and it’s understandable that she’d look at sweet nerdy little Felicity and resent her a little for being so cool with it all, or at least resent herself for not being that way; it’s all to easy to project your own failings onto someone else’s success, and Laurel’s an expert at it. Besides, how could she know that it hasn’t always been this way, that Team Arrow wasn’t always a team? She doesn’t see the two years it took them all to get here, to get to this place where they’re all so comfortable with each other. She doesn’t see how hard Felicity’s worked to cope as well as she does now, doesn’t see the learning curve it’s taken to make those silly jokes; she just hears the laughter.

That’s not all, though. The tight-knit team isn’t the only thing that cuts, isn’t the only thing she sees. She sees Sara’s funeral, too. Probably a dozen times an hour, a hundred times a day, over and over again until it’s enough to drive anyone half-crazy. She sees an old worn-down grave dug up and made new, an empty coffin filled up with a body she already thought she’d buried, a life lost in almost the exact moment she finally understood what it is, what it means, who Sara Lance really was. She sees the funeral, the dirt on the coffin, dust and decay and disturbed earth. She sees them throwing it over her sister’s coffin, her sister’s body, her sister’s memory… and she sees the little Jewish girl who talked about how it felt right to do those things, how it felt like honouring her. She sees _Felicity_ , and she wonders who the hell she is, this stupid girl with her stupid customs that don’t belong in her family, to show up at her sister’s funeral and cry like she knew her.

She doesn’t know that she did know her. She doesn’t know that they knew each other so well, so achingly well well. She definitely doesn’t know that Felicity has a scar on her shoulder from a bullet wound that Sara patched up. How could she possibly know that, when nobody ever mentioned it?

It’s not Laurel’s fault that she doesn’t understand, but it’s not Felicity’s fault either. Maybe it’s Sara’s fault, a little, for keeping secrets in the first place, but then who can really blame her for that? It’s the nature of what they do, of who they are, the tangled lives they lead. In all honesty, it’s probably no-one’s fault. It’s just the way things are, the way things have to be if they’re going to continue doing the good they do. It’s taken Felicity a long time to come to terms with it, and she knows it took Sara a while too; Laurel isn’t there yet, but she’s only just got here, and it’s hard enough for her to cope with the facts without adding the shades-of-grey morality on top of that. It wasn’t malice that kept this piece of Sara’s life hidden from her sister, and it wasn’t cruelty that made Felicity cry in a moment that was supposed to be Laurel’s. It’s just crossed wires, confusion between two people who never had any reason to know each other and are realising now for the first time that they might have one after all.

It’s not Felicity herself that Laurel resents, she knows. It’s not who she is or what she has or how much she knows that Laurel doesn’t. It’s the way she can still smile through her tears, even after burying a friend, the way she keeps the boys breathing easily no matter how hard the day has been, the way she makes herself useful even in the worst moments, even when she wants to break down. It’s what she’s become, the strength this new life has given her, all the things it’s taken two years to build and develop and earn. Laurel doesn’t see the work, and that’s not her fault any more than anything else. She missed it because she wasn’t there, because she wasn’t allowed to be there; how could she be expected to understand what happened when she knocked on the door and nobody answered?

Still, though, blameless as she is, all of that still colours the way she sees things, specifically the way she sees Felicity. She doesn’t see the confused tech nerd, just the badass who comes through when it counts. She just sees the _Encyclopaedia Vigilantica_ of healthy coping methods. Basically, she sees Felicity as the shining beacon of everything that she herself can’t be, everything she’s ever failed at. And boy, does that hurt.

Laurel’s new to all of this, and that means she’s new to Felicity too. At least, she’s new to this Felicity, the Felicity who works beside the Arrow, beside Oliver, in the middle of all these things that are so strange. And maybe one day, in this imaginary future she’s concocted when they do become friends, she’ll let her see all the other parts, the parts that aren’t polished so perfectly. But that day is not here yet, and until it arrives they can only make do with what they have.

Right now, what they have is three minutes, a name, a hacked phone, and the memory of a woman they both loved.

It might not be favour-friends material… but, hey, it’s a start.

*

The idea to ping Laurel’s GPS as well as her target’s comes unbidden and unexplained.

Maybe it’s boredom. Maybe it’s just restlessness. It’s been a long day, the first in a new job… well, old job, technically, but she’s trying not to think about that. Actually, she’s trying not to think about work at all. That’s one of the reasons she’s down here; it’s a quiet place, and for all the chaos that comes in here so often, it’s a place where she can peace out and chill. It’s like home, only a whole lot smaller and a little less lonely.

And, okay, so maybe it’s not just that. Maybe it’s not just restlessness or boredom or trying not to think about her new boss and his inappropriate dimples. Maybe it’s a little bit about Laurel, too. Maybe there’s just a little part of her that realises, and maybe for the first time, that she doesn’t know much more about Laurel than Laurel knows about her. She’s not got much in the way of tact, but she’s got enough that she doesn’t ask questions, enough to convince herself that she doesn’t want to know what Laurel plans on doing with the information she gives. She’s a lawyer, she thinks, so it can’t be too illicit. Well, she _hopes_ it can’t be too illicit, because if it is that’s a whole new can of worms and frankly that’s more than she can handle right now. Oliver’s out of town, Diggle and Roy with him, and a tidal-wave of illicit outside-the-law lawyer action is a whole lot more than one little nerd girl can clean up alone. Besides, if working for the Arrow has taught Felicity anything, it’s that sometimes it’s better — not to mention a whole lot safer — to just not ask.

Still, though, she’s kind of curious. Well, no, not really ‘curious’, so much as a little concerned. Which is to say, really freaking worried. Because as much as she doesn’t know about Laurel, the one thing she does know is that she does not handle grief well. Or, well, at all.

Besides, it doesn’t really count as ‘hacking’ if she doesn’t actually do anything with the information, does it? She’s just keeping an eye on a friend… well, a not-friend. An acquaintance. A possibly-sometimes-acquaintance-that-she-occasionally-thinks-about-in-possible-future-friend-terms. Because that’s normal, right? Anyway, she’s just checking up on her, just making sure that she doesn’t get herself into trouble, making sure she doesn’t use Felicity’s pinging powers for evil. Really, it’s what any responsible tech genius would do under the circumstances, and without Oliver or Diggle around to tell her that it was a stupid idea in the first place, she’s just doing the best damage control she can manage on her own.

She tracks the two of them to a skeevy bar a few blocks away from Verdant. It’s late by the time they collide, inching towards midnight, and about the only benefit of that is that she’s pretty sure she’s safe from her new boss’s prying eyes at this time of night; he probably thinks she’s weird enough already, after the day she’s had, without adding the potential felony of tracking two cellphones concurrently in what is fast approaching the middle of the night. Some things are best left outside the workplace, though in her line of work — both kinds — that’s often easier said than done.

The area is problematic, she can tell already, even without a 3D visual; she doesn’t know the bar itself, not being much of a drinker outside of special occasions and finding out your boss is secretly a masked vigilante, but the general location fills in the blanks for her quite neatly. It’s little more than a hole in the wall on the wrong side of a bad alley, and that means it’s cheap. Cheap drinks, cheap customers, and she can only imagine the sort of prince this guy must be if he’s spending his evenings there. More importantly, though, at least for now, she can imagine entirely too well the kind of trouble that Laurel will get herself into if she confronts him.

Which, of course, is exactly what she’s going to do.

It’s hard to know for sure what’s happening; with just a couple of phone locations to go by, it’s not exactly 3D IMAX with surround-sound. There’s no CCTV in that corner of the Glades — which, now that she thinks about it, might account for the elevated crime levels in the area — and that means no cameras for her to hack into and get a picture. There’s not much to go on at all, really, but it’s kind of amazing how much information two little blips on a screen can offer to a girl who knows what she’s looking for. This isn’t the first time Felicity’s done something like this, after all (though it’s not often that it leaves such a sour taste in her mouth), and she knows her stuff very well.

Two little blips on a screen. That’s what she has to work with. Two little blips on a screen, one red and one yellow, and both on a collision course.

Laurel gets the yellow blip, of course, in a private little homage to Sara and the moniker she chose for herself. _Canary_ , the yellow bird. Felicity always kind of thought it would have suited her so much better than it did Sara; they’re both blonde, both small, but Sara’s not fragile like Felicity, like a little bird stuck behind bars. She doesn’t sing like a canary; she screams like a hawk, and that never quite gelled with the whole ‘fragile caged bird’ namesake. At least, it never did to Felicity, not that she’d ever mention it to Laurel or Oliver. Well-intentioned or not, she would never debase Sara’s memory by daring to suggest that she picked the wrong nickname. That would just be unnecessarily cruel to everyone involved.

Still, though, inside her own head, she lets herself imagine something a little more powerful, a little more graceful. Still a bird, but a bigger one, the kind that rips with its talons, that hunts and kills, the kind you never forget. A bird of prey, not a canary in a cage.

Laurel’s not nearly so fragile as Felicity, but she’s still more of a canary than her sister ever was. She flits and flutters, and though she hates to be caged she always seems to let it happen. She’s not as wild as Sara was, and when she lashes out it’s without Sara’s precision, without her training; she flails in all directions and almost never finds her target. Some birds get put in cages for their own good, Felicity thinks, to keep them safe. From predators, from their own natural instincts, from all sorts of things. She doesn’t mean to be cruel — Laurel has suffered enough without any insults from her — but she can’t help wondering if maybe there’s a little more of the caged bird in their resident lawyer than any of them would like to admit. She doesn’t need protecting from the big bad world; truthfully, Felicity thinks she’s a whole lot tougher than any of them think. But protection from herself? Well, that’s a whole separate issue.

Right now, Laurel’s little canary-coloured blip is standing still. Well, sort of still, anyway. Laurel’s not the kind to stay still for very long, even when she is stuck in the same place, and Felicity watches the way her blip darts around on the screen, never more than a couple of inches in either direction, like she’s restless, even nervous. Pacing, maybe, or bouncing from one foot to the other. Always moving, even when she’s still.

The other guy is drunk. Probably even wasted. Felicity doesn’t need to be there, doesn’t need to be out there on the street to know that. His little red blip is weaving all over the place, unable to find a straight line, and she wouldn’t be surprised at all if he’d already knocked over a trash-can or two in his meaningless meanderings. _Damn drunks_ , she thinks, wrinkling her nose with no small measure of disgust, and immediately feels guilty when she remembers that just a few months ago that would have included Laurel too.

It’s about four seconds before they collide, and the violence of whatever they’re doing is reflected in the fever-hot flickering of their respective blips. Laurel’s is as straight as an arrow, driven and purposeful, and Felicity allows herself a moment of imagination as she watches, lets herself see it all through Laurel’s eyes, the whole world narrowing down to one point, one little red blip, flashing and wobbling and completely open. Since Sara, she’s been so angry, so filled with hate and violence; Felicity knows that Oliver’s worried about her, but in her mind’s eye she sees the good that can come of that anger, righteousness and justice, all the things that Oliver himself used to his benefit not so long ago. Anger is one hell of a powerful tool, she knows. She’s never had much of it herself, and maybe that’s why she does her best fighting from behind a screen.

Laurel has it in spades, though. Her anger is like a living thing, like a separate soul sharing a body, and when they’re in the same room it’s almost blinding. It’s nothing like the quiet restraint that kept Sara so cool most of the time, finely-honed and carefully polished until it shone; she was angry too, but not like this. She was a precision instrument, a surgeon’s scalpel sharpened to the keenest point. Laurel’s a firestorm, an explosion, and she’ll take down anyone who gets in her way before she even sees them standing there. Oliver’s right to be worried about her, Felicity thinks, but watching her in action — well, watching her pretty yellow blip in action, anyway — is like watching a kind of poetry in motion. Vicious, visceral poem, the kind that angst-ridden teenagers read when they’re thinking about the futility of existence. She’s like Emily Dickinson set to thrash metal, so destructive that it almost hurts, and Felicity aches to imagine what Sara would think if she could see her big sister now.

She’s so busy imagining how things are going down that she loses her focus. It’s a pretty picture, Laurel filled with her righteous fury and the other guy so filled with drink and stupidity that he doesn’t see her coming, but of course the problem with pretty pictures is that they’re not exactly realistic. The moment changes in a heartbeat, and Felicity’s so preoccupied by her pretty picture that she very nearly misses it. She’s distracted, and maybe that’s Laurel’s excuse too, because suddenly her blip is the one that’s swaying, the one that can’t hold a straight line, and suddenly Felicity is really, really glad that she doesn’t have visual or audio on this thing because she’s pretty darn sure she doesn’t want to see or hear what’s happening now.

It’s over twice as fast as it starts. Red Blip disappears into the night in what Felicity simultaneously hopes is and is not a car; if it’s not, they’ll have to add super-speed to their list of reasons to watch this guy, and if it is that means one very intoxicated lunatic behind the wheel. It’s a no-win situation, whichever it is, but before she has a chance to do anything about it, she’s distracted by Laurel’s blip, unnaturally still, a little yellow bird with its wings all clipped.

Her phone is out and in her hand before she’s even aware of having moved at all, fingers flying with automatic precision, navigating the touchscreen without even thinking, a dial-tone in her ears, and then ringing, ringing, ringing, and when she hears a voice it takes her an embarrassingly long moment to realise that it’s not Laurel but herself, that the voice is her own, that she’s panicking, terrified, whispering “pick up, pick up, pick up” over and over again, like she can reach through the space between them, reach through the air-waves, and make Laurel pick up her phone.

She doesn’t know where it’s coming from, the fear. They’re not friends, definitely not, and if Laurel thought for one second that she’d pinged her phone as well as her target’s, Felicity has no doubt that she’d find herself staring down the barrel of a lawsuit. There’s no real reason to feel like this, to panic like she is, not when all she really has to go by is a couple of blips on a computer screen, a frenzy of motion and a sudden impossible stillness. She doesn’t know why it frightens her, why it feels as raw and visceral as if she’d been there herself. Her mother used to say that she had a vivid imagination, and maybe that’s truer than Felicity ever believed, because she feels like she’s just watched every detail of something unspeakably brutal, like she’s seen it all in garish high-definition. It’s kind of amazing how much information two little blips on a screen can offer to a girl who knows what she’s looking for, she thinks again, and suddenly wishes that it wasn’t.

“Pick up,” she whispers. “Pick up, pick up, pick up…”

As stubborn and wilful as ever, Laurel does not.

*

She doesn’t know what possesses her to go out there alone, but she’s fairly sure it’s madness. Well, madness or stupidity. One of the two.

Little Red Blip is long gone by now. Well, given the trail of carnage he’s left in his wake, maybe Big Red Blip would be more accurate. Not that the name really matters at this point; point is, he’s gone, and though there’s a part of her that feels more than a little for guilty letting him drive off into the sunset (or, well, sunrise; it’s getting close to that time, isn’t it?), she has more important things to worry about just at the moment.

Actually, she kind of really desperately hopes that she _doesn’t_ have more important things to worry about, but the likelihood of a nice logical explanation for Laurel’s canary-blip going suddenly still is creeping closer and closer to complete extinction with every second that she refuses to answer her phone. Refuses, or, well, _can’t_ answer it; that’s also a distinct possibility, albeit one that Felicity is desperately trying not to think about right now. Because if that is the case, if there really is a ‘can’t’ situation going on here, she really doesn’t know what she’ll do.

As it turns out, what she does do is try very hard not to burst into tears.

Laurel isn’t unconscious. That’s something, at least. It’s a very good sign, actually, but it’s about the only good one she can find. She’s lying there on her back, staring up at the sky, and though it’s kind of hard to make out the look on her face through all the blood and swelling and bruises, Felicity’s pretty sure it’s the same sort of look that comes on survivors of burned-down houses or victims of circumstance who have just lost everything. The kind of look that says _‘this isn’t happening’_ or _‘how did I get here?’_. In Laurel’s case, it also kind of says _‘I’m not entirely sure which way is up right now’_ , but Felicity tries not to focus on that part.. She looks shell-shocked, not in the I-just-got-some-bad-news sort of way but in the horrible-traumatic-experience sort of way, the sort of way that’s going to need a whole lot more than a couple of Kleenex to wipe away the blood, the kind of pain that’s going to linger long after the swelling has gone down and the bruises are faded.

“Laurel?” It’s not the most original opener, but hey, whatever works. “Laurel. Can you hear me?” No response, not that she really expected one, given the whole not-answering-her-phone thing. “It’s, uh… it’s Felicity. You know, Felicity Smoak? You asked me to help you find this guy, and… well, that was clearly a horrible idea and a stupid mistake, but here we are, so I guess we’d better make the most of it.”

Laurel swallows; she doesn’t flinch, but it looks like it hurts. “Hi, Felicity.”

“Hey!” She’s more relieved than she wants to admit by the acknowledgement, and it’s all she can do not to hug her as she crouches down at her side, keeping a little safe distance between them. “Hi. Laurel. Hi.”

“Hi.”

Felicity tries to ignore the blood on the ground, on Sara’s jacket. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Stupidity.” Her eyes are glazed, hollow; Felicity has never seen them so empty. “Stupidity happened.”

“No…” She thinks about reaching for her hand, but stops herself; she’s seen this sort of thing in Oliver, even in Sara, and she knows better than to touch someone in this sort of pain without explicitly asking for permission. Different people react in different ways to things like this, and Laurel is unpredictable even at the best of times. “Well, okay. Maybe a little.”

“Maybe. A little.” It’s not like her to be monosyllabic, and that’s almost as worrying as the unconsciousness would’ve been. “Okay, then. Thanks for clarifying. You can go now.”

“Are you kidding?” Felicity splutters, indignant if not entirely graceful. “No, never mind, strike that. What I mean to say is, are you _crazy_?” Apparently so, because for once in her life Laurel has no answer. “You know I can’t just leave you here like this.”

“Of course you can.” She’s slurring, lower lip already starting to swell, and her eyes are unfocused. “It’s pretty easy, actually. You turn around, put one foot in front of the other, and keep going.” She tries to sigh, or maybe laugh, but she doesn’t have the strength and all that comes out is a pained whine. “I thought you were Team Arrow’s resident genius. Why do you need me to explain this to you?”

“I don’t,” Felicity says. “I didn’t mean I literally _can’t_. I meant, you know, I’m not going to. I’m not going to leave you here like this.”

“Oh.” She does manage to sigh this time, deep and low and completely resigned. Friends or not, the sound breaks Felicity’s heart. “Why not?”

The question stings, and it leaves her lost for words. That’s something that doesn’t happen very often, or at all, and it’s a strange kind of feeling, unsettling and tragic. How is she supposed to answer a question like that? It’d be easy if Laurel was just being _Laurel_ about it, if it was an ironic question designed to cut and jab like in a courtroom, a disarming misleading sort of question, but it’s not. She’s not asking out of spite or sullenness; she’s asking because she really doesn’t see the answer.

The honesty is brutal, shatters what little part of Felicity isn’t already broken by the sight of her lying there. It’s like she thinks she’s failed everything and everyone, like she’s let the whole world down just because she’s screwed up once, like she expects everyone she ever knew to turn their backs on her now like she’s already turned her own back on herself. She came out here to prove something, Felicity realises, not just to her dead sister, and it’s so much more than the blood and the pain that’s keeping her down on the ground.

 _Why not?_ , Felicity thinks, and the only answer she can think of is the simplest one.

“Because I’m not,” she says. “That’s why.”

Laurel’s breath is like a spider-web, delicate and fragile. “I really wish you would.”

Unfortunately, Felicity kind of already knows that. She’s seen Laurel at her most self-destructive, wasted on what was probably her entire body weight in alcohol; she remembers the look on her face, eyes glassy but empty, and she sees the same thing now. There’s no external influence this time, though, no booze or pills to blame for the way she’s lying there, the way she’s looking at her, the way she’s just waiting for the world to give up on her. She brought this on herself, just like she brought that on herself, but it feels so horribly different this time. It doesn’t feel like self-destruction; though she knows that’s exactly what it is, still looking at her doesn’t feel like looking at a drunk or a drug addict. Laurel doesn’t look like someone who has thrown herself against the wall; she looks like someone who was thrown there, who is blaming herself for someone else’s violence.

Sure, she was unprepared. Sure, she was stupid. But those things aren’t damning offences, and they don’t deserve an outcome like this. This is a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of Laurel Lance Screw-Ups, and she doesn’t deserve the hell she’s clearly putting herself through. Nobody deserves that, no matter what they’ve done, no matter how stupid or self-destructive. And they definitely don’t deserve to lose a sort-of-not-quite-definitely-not-a-favour-friend-type-person over it. Not that she ever really had one of those to lose, but there’s still that maybe-future that can’t be ignored. Either way, just because Laurel’s given up on herself doesn’t mean Felicity will.

It hurts too much to look at her, though. It hurts like hell to see her like this, so shattered, so different from the Laurel that future!Felicity might one day call a favour-friend. It hurts too much to see her, to think of that far-distant future, and her hurt feels like a dull echo of the pain that Laurel must be feeling, like a skittering of static over her skin. It’s painful, inescapable, and so Felicity turns her face away before it can turn the ache to tears.

Honestly, at this point, it’s kind of a token gesture. She’s not trying to hide her own sorrow, not really, because she knows that would be pointless; even if she was paying attention right now, Laurel’s probably too far gone to see much of anything at the moment. If she’s lucky she’ll be nursing a concussion for a few days, and if she’s not it’ll be something far worse, and neither of those things are conducive to noticing whether or not the petite blonde who may or may not have been stalking her cellphone is looking a bit sad. Besides which, her focus is clearly turned inwards; she probably wouldn’t notice even if Felicity stripped naked right in front of her. Knowing Laurel, who has a tendency to juggle at least forty-seven thoughts in a given moment, she’s using all of the meagre strength she has left just to keep her head attached to her shoulders. Honestly, even just the thought of so many things bouncing around inside a brain as scrambled as hers must be is enough to make Felicity feel a little queasy, vertigo clambering cruelly over the worry and the sorrow.

“Laurel,” she says aloud, and wishes that the name could be enough.

“I’m still here,” Laurel shoots back. “You don’t have to keep checking.”

It’s almost embarrassing, the way she tries to exert herself, the way she tries to convince either one of them that she still has some control over what happens around her. It lashes across the sorrow, the pain Felicity feels when she looks at her, and it’s so pitiful that there’s not a single part of her heartless enough to be offended.

“All right,” she says instead. “So, then, can you talk me through what happened? I need to know what to check for, what we might be dealing with here. Concussion, broken bones, that sort of thing. Internal bleeding maybe… but, God, I hope it’s not that. And so do you, by the way. Trust me. You definitely hope it’s not that.”

“Trust _me_ ,” Laurel counters. “I definitely don’t care.”

She believes it, too, and it’s a long moment before Felicity can swallow over the lump in her throat and press on. “Well, I do,” she says. “So let’s keep positive thoughts in our heads for my sake, shall we?” Laurel doesn’t have an objections to that, at least none that she seems willing to share with the class, so Felicity presses on. “All right then. Like I said, I need some idea of what went down out here… and, well, the GPS thing is all kinds of useful if you know how to use… which, yeah, I guess you know that already, since we’re here and all. But I kind of need more than ‘useful’ right now, if I’m going to get an idea of how you’re doing, vis a vis the whole _‘let’s hope it’s not concussion’_ thing. Basically, I need a visual, to—”

“Felicity.” Laurel licks her bloody lip, and winces like she’s been struck again, not even trying to mask the pain. “Stop talking. Please.”

“Okay,” Felicity says. “Okay. Sure. I can do that. But you… you have to talk instead, okay? You have to talk me through what you… I mean, what _he_ did. What happened, you know, the whole reason why we’re here having this conversation. You have to talk me through that. And then I’ll stop talking. I’ll stop talking and examine you. Because, you know, ‘tech nerd’ is close enough to ‘medical professional’, right?”

Laurel grimaces. “You know what happened,” she says, voice so thick it’s almost indecipherable. “You don’t need me to tell you. I hit him. He hit back. Then the ground hit back, too.” She closes her eyes. “Basically, there was a lot of hitting. It’s not exactly movie-of-the-year material.”

Felicity rolls her eyes, though she can’t deny being a little relieved by the feint at wit, flat as it falls. “Well,” she says, “maybe a surprise hit on the indie circuit.”

“Please stop doing that.”

By _‘that’_ , Felicity supposes she means trying to make her feel better. She doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to give up her compassion just because Laurel feels she doesn’t deserve it, but now isn’t the time for that argument. It’s hard enough to get Laurel to focus on what’s important without giving her a new reason to be evasive and stubborn. So, though she aches to fight back, aches to tell her that she does deserve it, that empathy and stupidity aren’t exclusive to each other, she doesn’t. She bites her tongue, shifts on her haunches to give herself something to do, focuses on what’s more important. They can step up and duke it out about self-flagellation versus compassion on another day. Hopefully a day that doesn’t involve blood and bruises.

“Okay.” She makes an effort to keep her voice clinical this time, or at least as clinical as she’s capable of being. Maybe even a little lawyerish, in the vain hope that Laurel will connect to someone as detached as she is. “This clearly isn’t getting us anywhere.”

Laurel’s eyes roll back. “There’s that genius Ollie’s always bragging about…”

Felicity doesn’t dignify that with a response. “This _clearly_ isn’t getting us anywhere,” she says again, a little more emphatic. “And who the hell am I kidding, pretending I know the first thing about it anyway?” She thinks back, manages the ghost of a smile. “You know, I almost passed out the first time I saw Oliver come back from a fight looking like this. Tracking blood all over the Foundry, all over his clean outfit… let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. Well…” she amends quickly, “it wasn’t _not_ pretty. You know, it was still Oliver, and he’d make anything look…” 

“Arrogant,” Laurel finishes helpfully, before Felicity can bury herself in a hole of awkward over-sharing.

“Arrogant, yes,” she says. “Like certain others I could name. On which note, I’m gonna go call an ambulance. They can deal with you.”

“I don’t need an ambulance,” Laurel insists, like Felicity knew she would. “I just want to lie here for a few minutes. Then I’ll go home.”

“No, you won’t.” Felicity forces a smile; it’s weak and kind of pathetic, but at least it’s there, which is more than can be said for any expression on Laurel’s. “We both know that the second I turn my back, you’ll go rushing after that guy again. And if we can be realistic for a second here, you weren’t exactly in any condition to take him out before he turned you into a sandwich. You go after him again, he’ll still walk away without a scratch and you’ll end up in even more trouble. Maybe even get yourself killed this time.” She stops there for a second, takes a breath and holds it, because she knows how much pain she’s about to inflict. “Do you really think that’s what Sara would’ve wanted? Do you really think she died just so you could join her a week later?”

“Don’t,” Laurel says, and there’s a crack in her voice that says it’s not about Felicity at all. “Don’t you dare talk about her. Don’t you dare say her name like that, like you have any idea… like you could possibly…”

But the argument is as weak as she is, and it sputters out before she has a chance to finish her dead-end train of thought. Felicity crouches down low, braces one hand on the ground, as much to keep it occupied as to keep her balance. It’s taking everything she has to keep from touching Laurel, to keep from putting that hand against her jaw, to keep from aggravating the half-dozen half-formed bruises already turning her face into a wash of colour.

She understands; that’s the crux of it, the heart of everything she’s feeling right now. Friends or not, she understands. She understands what Laurel’s feeling, understands that it’s not her she’s yelling at, that it’s the situation, her own helplessness, anything and everything she can find. Felicity understands all of that, her grief and her pain and her tendency to fire off shots at anyone she can hit just to feel like she’s hitting something. She _understands_ , and it is damn near impossible to feel anything but the ache of affection when you understand.

“I know,” she says, a tender whisper that she imagines Laurel doesn’t hear. “I know it hurts.”

“Go away,” Laurel says, not for the first time, then hisses at the sting of salt in open wounds. Felicity politely pretends she doesn’t see the tears. “Please, go.”

“I will,” Felicity says. “I’ll go away soon. Just… not quite yet.”

This time, it’s Laurel who can’t look at her, Laurel who turns her face away. That’s kind of problematic, given the situation, and her cheek presses into the ground, an open wound exposed to dirt and gravel and broken glass before Felicity has a chance to tell her that it’s not only unsanitary but potentially dangerous. Who knows what kind of infection she’s risking, let alone the obvious pain? But then, maybe that’s the point. Self-destruction is kind of Laurel’s _raison d’être_ most days, and today more even than usual. It wouldn’t be out of character at all if she was doing this as much to amplify her own pain as to hide from Felicity’s scrutiny.

It’s a tragic thought, sad and sobering, and if Felicity lets herself stop and really think about it, the kind of screwed-up self-inflicted suffering that comes so effortlessly to her, she’s pretty sure Laurel won’t be the only one with tears in her eyes. Her chest aches at the sight of her, eyes closed, skin pale in the places that the bruises haven’t touched, smeared with blood in the places where the tears haven’t washed it away. She looks smaller than Felicity’s ever seen her, and more helpless too, though they both know she wouldn’t thank her for pointing that out. She doesn’t look like a lawyer at all; right now, she barely even looks like a grown-up.

“Hey,” Felicity says, because she can’t bear the silence, can’t bear the rise and fall of Laurel’s chest as she fights tears and fights to breathe. Maybe also a little because she kinda wants to get them both a little closer to the hospital, not that she’ll let Laurel know that. “No-one’s going to play the perfect game every time, you know?”

Laurel sighs against the ground. “Just once would be a start,” she says, and she sounds so miserable, so utterly deflated, that Felicity finds herself floundering for a way to make her feel better.

“You’ll get there.”

It feels like an empty promise, vapid and stupid and if Oliver was here she knows he’d be furious with her; he’d accuse her of encouraging Laurel, of pushing her towards a path that he’s desperate for her avoid. He doesn’t see that she’s hell-bent on walking it, that she’s going to do this whether he approves or not. He may know Laurel better than any of them, but none of them have the same problem he does of underestimating her. She’ll do what she wants, with his permission or without it, and frankly Felicity would sooner put herself in a position where Laurel can call on her if she needs something, than push her away so hard that she’ll bleed to death as a point of pride the next time something like this happens.

“I just thought…” Laurel’s eyelids flutter, like she wants to look up at her, but she’s still too vulnerable, and she hides behind her lashes again, staring at the far wall instead. “I just wanted…”

“I know,” Felicity says again. “You just wanted to make a difference. You just wanted to do some good. And you will. You _do_ , Laurel, already. And one little setback isn’t going to change that. It just means you’re willing to try. And you do try. You try so hard… and, well, okay, so maybe not in the best way. I mean, well, maybe kind of in the most stupid way possible…” Laurel’s breath catches in her throat, sharp enough that she cries out, and Felicity quickly backtracks. “…But that’s not what we’re talking about right now. We need to work on your methods some, sure, but we can do that. I mean, Oliver can. Maybe. If he doesn’t skin us both when he finds out about this… but that’s…”

“…not what we’re talking about right now,” Laurel finishes tiredly.

“Right. What we’re talking about is the fact that you tried to do good. That counts for a lot, Laurel. I mean, it has to. It has to count for _something_ , at least. If it doesn’t… well, what are we doing here?”

“I don’t know.” It’s less than a whisper, more like the echo of one, and her lips are barely moving at all. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

That much is readily apparent, Felicity thinks, but she knows better than to say so aloud. Laurel’s in a pretty bad way right now, and not just physically; what she needs right now is compassion, whether she wants it or not, and it won’t help anyone to humour the parts of her that are so desperate for punishment. What will help, however, is getting her into the hands of people who actually did train as medical professionals, who know a little bit more about situations like this, and who know how to deal with self-destructive wannabe-heroes like Laurel Lance, or at least the battle-scars that come from their wannabe-heroics. At the very least, if Felicity can manage by some miracle to get Laurel into a hospital bed, then maybe she’ll have a shot at crawling into her own bed at some point before the sun comes up.

“Laurel,” she says again. “I know you don’t want to hear it… hell, I know you don’t want to hear anything at all from me right now. And, honestly, why would you? I’m just the girl who dropped everything in the middle of a super-hectic day to help you track down this guy in the first place, right? I’m just the girl who…” Realisation lands like a blow, cutting off her train of thought and replacing it with an entirely new one. “Which, when you think about it, I guess that kind of makes this my fault. A little bit. Or, you know, a lot. Maybe. Kind of. But, hey, you’re not the kind of girl who holds grudges, are you?”

Actually, Laurel’s probably one of the most most grudge-holdy people Felicity’s ever met in her life, but apparently getting the living hell kicked out of her in a back alley was good for her soul, or at least good for soothing over her pride, because all she has to say for herself is a breathy, miserable, “No.”

“Good,” Felicity goes on. “Because honestly, Laurel, if I’d thought for one second you’d go running off after him… heck, if I’d thought for a second that he was the kind of guy who deserved a little running-after in the first place, I’d never have helped you to find him. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d’ve still tried to help you… but, you know, maybe in a more productive kind of way? A way that doesn’t involve middle-of-the-night trips to the hospital?” She shakes her head. “I mean, how was I supposed to know that you’d use my intel for nefarious purposes?”

Laurel swallows; Felicity watches the line of her throat, the strain and pain. “No,” she says again, hoarse. “No, it’s… it’s not your fault.”

Comforting as the words are, they’re not exactly true, are they? “You sure about that?” she presses. “Because from where I’m sitting, I basically threw a stick at an oncoming freight train and told you to go fetch.”

“I’m not a puppy, Felicity.”

Felicity shrugs. “Maybe not. But then, you’re not much of a canary, either.”

Laurel doesn’t say anything; she just goes back to staring up at the sky, lashes long and dark as they blink back another wave of tears.

For her part, Felicity just sighs again; she’s tired, frustrated, and more than a little annoyed. With Laurel’s stubbornness, sure, but with herself as well. She really should have known better, she thinks. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, of course (not that she’d know; she’s not been twenty-twenty since she was two years old), but it’s as clear as daylight now, staring her right in the face. She really should have seen Laurel’s harmless little request for what it was, rage and fury and vengeance. Red Blip Guy might not have had anything directly to do with Sara’s death, but little details like that aren’t exactly stopping Laurel right now.

It’s little more than a week since she pulled a gun on an innocent man, since she pulled the trigger too. She’s more than just angry, more than just righteous; if left unchecked, she could become flat-out dangerous. Which, yea, this evening kind of proves. Last week, they were all lucky; Oliver was there to stop her, to recognise the rage in her, the irrational flash in her eye that he knows so well, that Felicity doesn’t know at all. If it wasn’t for his quick thinking, though, Laurel would’ve done a whole lot worse than look stupid. She’s done a whole lot worse than that tonight, in fact, and it’s only by sheer dumb luck that neither of those two stupid little blips stopped moving for good.

Felicity should’ve seen it coming. It’s her responsibility to keep Starling safe, to keep _Laurel_ safe while Oliver and the others are out of town. It’s her job to keep things running smoothly, to keep things in one piece, and Laurel’s been a walking time-bomb ever since Sara’s death. She knows that, dammit. But, then, Oliver’s the one with the common sense, isn’t he? He’s the one who knows when to take the bullets out of a gun, who recognises the tremors in Laurel’s hands, the void behind her eyes; he’s the one who knows her, knows her well enough to see that she’s about to rush off and do something stupid like this. He’s the one who knows what to do, how to stop her. He knows her, and for all her skills in front of a keyboard that’s something Felicity cannot emulate.

Well, she amends, not right now. In that distant imaginary future she has in her head, the one where they really are favour-friends, maybe she does know Laurel that well, maybe she does know when to stop her, how to break through to her when she’s shell-shocked and self-destructive. But that day is really, really far from this one, and future!Felicity’s intimate knowledge and grasp of The Laurel Equation doesn’t help now!Felicity to deal with their current conundrum. Namely, the desperate need to get now!Laurel into a damn hospital bed.

“Anyway,” she says aloud, letting the word set her brain back on track. “Like I was saying. I know you don’t want to hear it right now, Laurel, but we really need to get you checked out by a professional. Or, well, I guess I could do it if you wanted, but I think you’ve made it pretty clear that you don’t want me here, and frankly my medical expertise is pretty much limited to not passing out at the sight of blood nowadays. I’m not exactly the world’s leading authority on giving physicals to self-destructive lawyers in back alleys, and… wow, that came out more wrong than it sounded in my head.”

Laurel doesn’t even crack a smile. “Nice to know there’s something you’re not perfect at.”

“I’m not perfect at a lot of things,” Felicity says, kind of hurt. “I’m not trying to be perfect, I’m just trying to—” But then it hits her, what Laurel’s doing, how embarrassingly obvious it is. “I’m just trying to get you to the hospital. That’s all I’m trying to do. So, you know, if it’s all the same to you, I really would recommend the whole, you know, ‘ambulance’ thing.” Laurel doesn’t immediately respond, but she looks so upset that Felicity can’t help throwing her an ill-advised bone. “Unless you think you can stand. Then I could, you know, escort you.”

Laurel closes her eyes, keeps them closed, and Felicity winces in empathic pain to see how swollen they are already. “I don’t care,” she says, hopeless and miserable. “Do what you want. I don’t care.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Felicity says; they’re getting sidetracked again, she knows, but she can’t bring herself to let this lie. “In fact, I know it’s not. Take it from Team Arrow’s resident genius.”

“Don’t…” Laurel whispers, and it sounds so much like a plea.

But of course Felicity does. “Look, Laurel, I know you’re angry. I know you’re upset. I know you’re in a hell of a lot of pain at the moment, and not just from the whole _‘beaten to within an inch of your life’_ thing. I know you’re hurting over Sara, over yourself, over a whole mess of things. And I know it’s hard. I know that, I do. And I know… I know that I don’t know you as well as Oliver does, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know you at all. I know that you care. I know that you care a lot. So much that you’d get yourself beaten to within an inch of your life by some drunk idiot because you care too much to let him get away with whatever the hell he’s been doing. You care so much you’d burn yourself to the ground before you’d let an injustice get away. You’re not the sort of person who doesn’t care, Laurel. You’re the sort of person who cares too much.”

Laurel doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to; Felicity doesn’t need to know her as well as Oliver does, or even at all, to know exactly what she’s thinking right now, exactly what she’s feeling. She knows that she cares, just as well as Felicity knows it, and that’s what’s killing her. It’s not that she doesn’t care; of course it’s not. It’s that she wishes she didn’t.

Against her better judgement, Felicity finally reaches out to touch her. She keeps the contact light, keeps her palm facing upwards, keeps her touches as fleeting as she can. She keeps as much distance as possible while closing what little there is, but she just can’t bear the thought of not touching her right now, of not letting her know that, however much it feels like she’s alone, she isn’t. She has to let her know that, and because she knows Laurel wouldn’t let her get away with saying it out loud, she has to make do with saying it through her fingertips. _You’re not alone. You’re never alone_.

They both lost Sara, albeit in different ways, but for Felicity it was the first time. It was a good friend, but a friend who did dangerous work, and she’d seen the kind of trouble the Canary flew into too many times not to expect something like this in the end. She can’t imagine what Laurel must be feeling, how much it must hurt to lose her sister for the second time, to lose her for good when she’s only just got her back after so long. She can’t imagine the depth of that loss, a loss lying on top of so many others, all terrible, all so unfair. She can’t understand that, can’t even pretend to, but she’s not totally in the dark. She has her share of loss; it’s different, but it’s there. And she definitely knows a thing or too about caring too much. She knows, too, the chaos of being thrust into this new nightmarish world, this world where bad things happen so much more often than good things. She may not know Laurel, but she knows this kind of life, and she knows how much it hurts to be a part of it.

Now isn’t the time for sharing all that, though. Now is the time to take the opening Laurel has given her, the pretence of not caring, and use it to do what she’s been trying to do ever since she got here.

“I’ll be right back,” she says softly, sliding her cellphone out of her pocket as she climbs to her feet and moves away.

Laurel doesn’t argue, doesn’t speak at all. Felicity lets herself think that maybe she’s exhausted herself, that maybe all that stubborn evasiveness has finally worn her down, or maybe just that the pain’s gotten to her at last. She lets herself imagine that it’s smooth sailing from now on, that they won’t have to do this weird hurt-comfort small-talk thing they’re doing, that they can go their separate ways once this is done, once Laurel’s safely in the hospital and Felicity’s been forced to contact her next-of-kin. Because, yeah, that’s a thing that needs to happen, and they both know perfectly well that if Laurel has her way Captain Lance won’t ever know anything; even after what happened to Sara, she’d still sooner he think she was dead than in pain. So that’s on Felicity too, letting Daddy Lance know that his kid is in the hospital again. Which will be… the exact opposite of fun, probably.

Still, though, she pushes past the thought of that awkward-but-inevitable phone-call, to the twilight hours that’ll come after. She lets herself imagine getting home and crawling blissfully into bed (for the whole forty-six minutes before she has to get up and go back to work), and the idea is so deliciously intoxicating she almost misses the sound of Laurel’s voice cutting through her fantasy.

“Felicity?”

Her voice is so small, so weak, like she’s given up on everything that ever made her who she is, and Felicity feels another pang in her chest as she turns back to her, sees her still lying there exactly where she left her, face turned up towards the fading starlight, limbs twisted awkwardly beneath her. She’s a living breathing cry for help, and Felicity is pretty much the only person she knows who’s not a hero, so why is she the only one who can answer?

“I’m here,” she says. “I’m still here.”

“I don’t…” Laurel’s voice is shaky, and her words slur as they trip and stumble over her swollen lip. “Felicity…”

“It’s okay,” Felicity says. “It’s okay. I’m still here. I mean, I know you want me to go, and I will. I am. That’s what I’m doing. It’s just, I need to call an ambulance first. Like we talked about. You remember? The whole _‘get you to a hospital’_ thing? You remember that?” She doesn’t think for a second that Laurel hit her head that hard, hard enough to forget this entire conversation, much as she might want to, but you can never be too cautious. “That’s all, okay?”

“No.” Laurel tries, and fails, to shake her head. “I don’t need an ambulance. I don’t need anything.” She takes a breath, and the way it hitches strikes like heat in Felicity’s chest. “I can go myself.”

Felicity’s not entirely sure she believes that, but this is the most compliant Laurel’s been since she arrived and she’s not about to step over that. “Are you sure?” she asks, because that’s a whole lot safer than another round of _‘are you crazy?’_. “You know it’s no trouble, calling an ambulance. That’s what they’re there for, isn’t it?”

Laurel shakes her head again, this time with some degree of success. “They’re there for people who need them. Which I don’t. I can go myself. I don’t need help.” Her voice cracks on the last word — shatters, actually — but they both ignore it. Laurel steadies her breathing, forces herself up onto her arms. Her whole frame’s shaking with exertion and pain, but she holds herself upright by sheer force of will. “You can come with me if you want. I don’t care. But I’m not… I’m not wasting the city’s resources. Not on this.”

“It’s not…” Felicity starts, but cuts herself off before they can get into a debate about this. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m just not really sure it’s a good idea for you to be walking around so soon after getting… well, uh, you know. I mean, you were there, so I’d hope you know.”

Laurel’s arms are trembling. “I know.”

“Right. And, well, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t think you can.” _We both know how stubborn you are when you set your mind to something,_ she doesn’t say, _and how self-destructive._ “It’s just… you know, it’s just not sensible.”

“Well,” Laurel says, groaning as she makes it to her knees, “I think we’ve both established that I’m not really having a ‘sensible’ night.”

Given the situation, Felicity supposes she can’t argue with that.

*

It takes a few minutes for Laurel to stumble completely to her feet, but Felicity knows better than to try and talk her out of it.

Honestly, it feels like enough of a victory that she’s agreed to go to the hospital at all, and Felicity can’t help thinking that the chances of her having internal injuries are considerably lower than the likelihood that she’ll refuse to do anything at all, as a point of sheer wilful pride, if Felicity deigns to mention the ambulance again. So, as desperately as she wishes that common sense would win the day once in a while, she makes her peace with Laurel’s legendary stubbornness and instead entertains herself by pacing back and forth in front of her like some kind of tiny blonde guard dog.

It’s kind of hilarious, really, the way she acts like she’s the least bit useful when they both know she’s not. What the hell would she do if someone did show up right now, or if Red Blip came back to finish what he started before? Somehow, she rather doubts that Tiny Blonde Guard Dog would frighten anyone except a particularly skittish mouse. She might look the part, at least from the right angle, but she’s not fooling anyone into believing she really is capable of guarding anything. Not that she isn’t okay with that; she made her peace long ago with the passivity that comes with being a nerd. It’s just kind of sad, the way that even she forgets it sometimes.

Fact is, she’s not the ass-kicking type. It’s a fact she accepted about a million years ago, and it’s not something that’s ever really bothered her since. Not even when she’s turning her face away to keep from ruining the upholstery at the sight of another brutal Arrow-wound. Not even when she’s the only member of the team who can’t go ten rounds with the salmon ladder and not even break a sweat. She has her own specialist skills, her own gifts to give; Sara taught her that.

Self-defence is one thing, she knows. She’s proven more than a handful of times that she’s no slouch when it comes to stepping up and keeping herself out of danger, but protecting someone else is a whole different story. Not counting that one fluke with Sara, anyway, and the less said about that the better given her present company. It might make the path to almost-friendship a little bit smoother between them, but now is definitely not the time to try it. Anyway, protecting the innocent was never Felicity’s deal. It’s Oliver’s, and he should be here instead. Laurel’s his ex-lover-turned-friend-turned-project-turned-God-only-knows-what, and even if she wasn’t any of those things, he’s the saving-people guy. He’s the guy in the hood, the arrow guy, the hero. Felicity… well, she’s just tech support.

She stops her pacing when Laurel’s finally upright; she’s gone pale, swaying on her feet like she used to do when she was drunk, but her jaw’s clenched in that way it does when she’s got a fire inside of her; Felicity has seen that look a few times before, and she knows what it means. It means _‘to hell with safety, to hell with being good, to hell with everything’_. It means she’s made up her mind to do this, and that means nothing else matters. As soon as it starts, as soon as she sets her jaw like that, it doesn’t matter how stupid it is, doesn’t matter if it lands her in the waiting grave next to her sister; all that matters is getting the job done.

That’s the problem with Laurel, Felicity thinks, moving in to support her from the side; she doesn’t value her own life. It doesn’t take Oliver to see the way she’s grieving for her sister, or to know the terrible ways that grief takes hold of her. She’s not drowning in a bottle of booze this time, or a bottle pills, but she’s drowning in something else, and it bothers Felicity more than it should to see it. Laurel could be such a good person, so strong and so vibrant, so _capable_ , if she’d only give herself a chance, if she’d only see those things inside herself. But she doesn’t; she refuses to. All she sees is a train-wreck, a mess of a soul who’s always losing someone, always chasing someone away. Felicity is no stranger to grief, but she can’t imagine going through as much of it as Laurel has, can’t imagine how it must feel to lose everyone who ever meant anything to her, the dead and the living too.

Her dad’s still around, but Felicity knows about his struggles, the same addictive personality that he passed on so generously to his daughter. He’s come out fighting, and maybe Laurel got that from him too because she’s fighting her demons just the same. Maybe she’ll look like him too in a few years, well-adjusted and professional. Either way, though, it’s been a long path for Captain Lance to get where he is, and for Laurel she knows it was still a kind of loss before he found his way back. At the very least, it was a kind of abandonment and at the worst possible time.

The same is true of her mother, Felicity knows, though she’s gleaned that more from inference than anything Laurel herself has ever said. She recognises a little of herself in the way she talks about her mother, or the way she doesn’t; she’s seen those shadows before, the ones that cloud her eyes. She’s felt that same resentment, too, whenever she talks about her own mother, and it’s hard not to recognise the same feeling in someone else. In that, at least, they have some shred of common ground, a spectre of like-mindedness that maybe one day will connect them. For now, it’s nothing more than a wisp, but in that ever-elusive future, who knows?

It’s little wonder, she thinks, that someone like Laurel would think so little of herself, that she’d place her own safety so low down on her list of priorities that it might as well not exist at all. It’s all she’s ever learned. For six, seven years, it’s the only thing that ever had any kind of consistency in her life: people leave, and they specifically leave _her_. It breaks Felicity’s heart all over again to look at her, to know why she’s in pain, where it all comes from, why her pride hurts so much more than a concussion or a couple of broken bones.

“Laurel,” she says, and maybe she sounds a little more tender than she meant to because for about half a second Laurel’s whole body deflates, slumping against her as she takes her weight.

“I don’t need help,” she says, but she doesn’t pull away.

“I know you don’t,” Felicity tells her. “But it’s not often that I get to come out into the field and pretend to be the hero. You know? I’m the nerdy tech girl. I don’t get to be the knight in shining armour. That’s Oliver’s job, remember? I mean, not that he wears armour. Though he really should. Don’t you think? All that running around, he really should wear armour…” She catches herself, jolts out of her reverie before it gain any more momentum. “Anyway. My point is, I don’t get to do this sort of thing very often. So even though we both know you don’t need any help… heck, even though we both know you could take me out if you wanted to, even when you’re looking like this… even though we both know all of that, maybe let me have my moment?”

Laurel sighs against her; she’s shivering, Felicity notices, though whether it’s from the shock or because she’s cold it’s hard to say. “Okay,” she manages at long last. “You can have your moment.”

“You’re so generous,” Felicity deadpans, and tries to ignore the way that Laurel whimpers when her elbow brushes her ribs, the way she’s still swaying even though Felicity’s all but holding her upright. She wishes that she was stronger, or even just a little bit taller, wishes that playing the hero didn’t involve so much blood.

Apparently Laurel feels the same way, at least about the blood, because they make it about four steps before she stops again, turning deathly pale. Her whole body goes rigid against Felicity’s side, stiff but still shaking, and for a second Felicity’s terrified that she’s touched something she shouldn’t have. Not in the inappropriate way, that is, more in the _‘ouch oh my god I’m dying what the hell did you do?’_ sort of way; it’s a whole lot less unintentionally sexy and a whole lot more frightening. Felicity still doesn’t have the faintest idea where most of Laurel’s injuries are, or how serious, and neither of them are particularly graceful even at the best of times. For all she knows, she could’ve hit something, or worse, grossly underestimated the likelihood of internal injuries. God, she hopes not.

“What is it?” she asks aloud, and her voice is shaking as hard as Laurel. “Did I hurt something? Oh my God, did I rupture something? Don’t tell me I ruptured something…”

“No.” There’s that distant hazy voice again, the one Felicity thought they left behind ten minutes ago. “You didn’t do anything. You…”

She trails off, though, like finding words is suddenly more than she can manage, and Felicity catches the glint of her reflection — their reflections — in the window of a nearby car. _Oh,_ she thinks, and wishes she didn’t understand as well as she does.

“It’s okay.” She thinks of Oliver, of the way he used to spend hours staring at himself in the mirror-like shine of the Foundry’s tables, in the glass cabinet where he keeps his outfit, in any reflective surface he could find. Hours and hours, just staring at himself and mouthing indecipherable curses under his breath. Shell-shock, she thinks, and lets her hand slide down to squeeze Laurel’s fingers. “It’s okay. They’ll fix you up at the hospital. You’ll be good as new in no time.” She tries to smile but she can’t, not that Laurel’s looking at her anyway; she’s fixated on her own face, the mottled pattern of the bruises, the places where it’s swollen, the smear of blood across her forehead. “Laurel, it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay!” She tries to shout, but her voice is thread-thin, and her hand is trembling so hard that it slips right out of Felicity’s grasp. “It’s not okay. It’s not! I shouldn’t… I wasn’t… I… _Sara_ …”

The name is a blow to them both. Felicity wonders if it’s a Lance thing, all this self-loathing, this desperate need to internalise every little thing; Sara had her share of it too. “You’re not Sara, Laurel,” she says. “And she wouldn’t want you to be. She sure as hell wouldn’t want you to get yourself beaten to a pulp in her name. You know that. You know she wouldn’t want this for you.”

That strikes a nerve, and one that Laurel didn’t want to feel, because she hisses and straightens up, pulling out of Felicity’s arms and bracing herself against the car she’s been staring into. She looks tortured, like she desperately wants to turn this into a fight — _‘you have no idea what my sister would want’_ or _‘you don’t know her like I know her’_ or _‘this is none of your business’_ — but she doesn’t. She just keeps right on staring at her reflection, bruised and bleary-eyed, and gasps for breath as she fights with everything she has to ignore what Felicity said, the truth of it, the honesty that she doesn’t have the strength to hide from. She’s so busy fighting herself, fighting what she knows, what she understands in her deepest and darkest places, that there’s nothing left in her to fight anyone else. Not even vertically-challenged tech nerds, apparently, and everyone knows that they’re the easiest targets.

It makes Felicity worried all over again, makes her want to ease Laurel down to the ground and hold her until the world stops, because this Laurel Lance is like nobody she’s ever met. She’s hollow, empty, and it breaks Felicity’s heart all over again to think back to the moment Laurel’s little yellow blip stopped moving, the moment it went from a bird in flight, graceful and powerful, to a tiny shivering thing with clipped wings and a world as small as a cage.

“Laurel,” she urges, as gently as she can. “We should…”

“We should go.” Blood drips onto the car, black on black against the reflected moonlight. “That’s what we should do. We should _go_.”

She shoves herself away from the car, lashes at the tears on her face with fists that slam against bruises, streak with blood, violent and unforgiving, and if Felicity wasn’t so frightened right now, so frightened and so worried, she’d take her into her arms and never let go.

“Okay,” she says instead, because it’s all she has. “Let’s go.”

*

Once they’re in motion, getting to the hospital isn’t nearly as arduous as Felicity thought it would be.

It’s not exactly pleasant, but at the very least it’s quiet, and Laurel doesn’t collapse in paroxysms of pain at any point, so on the whole she considers it a win. Well, a sort-of win, anyway; Laurel’s deathly silent, staring at some fixed point on the horizon that Felicity can’t see, and doesn’t respond to anything she says. She’s tried small-talk, gentle encouragement, even the occasional insult just to see if that’ll get a rise out of her, but nothing does. It’s like she’s a ghost, empty and hollow, like there’s nothing left in her at all; it’s like all the things that made her Laurel got buried beside her sister, or at least left for dead in that stupid back-alley, and Felicity got unknowingly roped into sending her spirit to the afterlife.

Or, well, maybe something a bit less morbid. She’s not entirely sure what, since everything seems to come back to death lately, but there must be a more effective and less creepy metaphor out there somewhere.

Either way, metaphor or no metaphor, it’s still hard. It’s hard to see her like this, and not just because she looks like hell. The blood and bruises are one thing, but it’s the vacant look on her face that’s really haunting. Felicity’s gotten used to people tracking blood all over her nice clean Foundry floor; she’s even gotten used to seeing her friends stitch each other up, closing open wounds without so much as a sedative right there in front of her, like it’s just another Monday morning, just another typical day at the office. She’s seen a hell of a lot since she joined up with Oliver and his little operation, and though she’s far from numbed to the sight of violence, she’s definitely a whole lot better at dealing with it than she used to be.

What she’s not so good at dealing with is this. Silence and blank stares, the hollowed-out eyes and the way that Laurel bites down on a lip already swollen and bloody, seemingly without feeling it. Laurel was never exactly vivacious, even at her prime, never the kind of woman who could be described as ‘full of life’ or ‘overflowing with energy’, but there was always something about her, something electric. It was never a question of why Oliver was drawn to her; it was a question of why she couldn’t see that magnetism in herself. But even then, she was aware. She was alert and aware, and she always had something to say. She was _alive_ , and that’s the opposite of how she looks now.

It’s hard to know how to deal with that, hard to cope with it. Felicity has long since learned how to turn a blind eye to tough guys in masks pretending they don’t feel the pain as they punch each other’s shoulders and take another swing at the salmon ladder. She’s used to Oliver’s flexing, Diggle’s gentle laughter, even Sara’s passion, and the way all three of them never seem to notice the countless colours painting their bodies. She’s never seen Laurel that way before, always thought that if there did come a day when she’d take a hit, she’d feel it from head to toe.

The thing is, she really meant it when she said that Laurel isn’t like Sara. They’re nothing alike. Sara can take anything the world throws at her, shrug it off without a second thought and keep right on coming. Laurel’s not like that; she’s a feeler, an emoter, the kind of person who lets the whole world know how she’s feeling in any given moment. They both have a kind of passion, but that’s where the similarity ends; it’s so unfathomably different, the things they do with it. Fact is, if someone had told Felicity this morning that by midnight she would be dealing with a shell-shocked, pain-numbed Laurel Lance, she would’ve quietly reminded them that Sara is dead and Laurel wouldn’t take kindly to being called by her name. Sara’s the one who numbs herself; Laurel’s the one who wears her heart on her sleeve, the one who cries long and loud and openly, and who doesn’t care who sees it. This broken husk isn’t her. It may not be Sara, but it’s sure as hell not Laurel.

They stop outside the hospital, Laurel braced against the brickwork, breathing hard and looking pale, and Felicity watching her with wide eyes and an ache in her heart.

“Hey,” she says, as softly as she can.

“Hey.”

It’s not much, but it’s a start; at the very least, it’s something she can work with. “So, uh… here we are.”

“Here we are.”

Felicity sighs. “I’d let you take it from here on your own… but I think we both know you’d just turn around and walk out the second I turned my back. Which, okay, sure, two points for stubbornness, I guess, not that that’s something you should get rewarded for right now, since that’s what got you into trouble in the first place, and—”

“Felicity, please. Not now.”

“Okay. Sorry. Anyway, I was just saying… since you let me drag you all the way here, you might as well let me see you all the way in, right? Make sure you get tucked in, safe and sound?” Fact is, she won’t be able to rest until she sees the thing done, until she sees Laurel lying in a bed and knows that she’ll be staying there until someone with real medical training tells her it’s okay to leave. “You don’t want me to stay up all night worrying about you, do you?”

“I don’t want anyone to worry about me.” She doesn’t look good, and Felicity can’t figure out whether it’s a good thing they got here when they did, or if it’s the fact that they’re _here_ that’s turning her so pale; either way, it’s the exact opposite of not-worrying. “I just want…”

“I know,” Felicity says with a sigh, and touches her hand again. “But, since we’re both here…”

“It’s fine,” Laurel says, and Felicity wonders if she even remembers the question. “Do what you want. I don’t care.” 

Felicity sighs. She should be getting tired of all this, the endless repetition of the same old tired line that neither of them believe. They both know that Laurel does care, both know that she’s not feeling either of them, but she keeps singing the same tune, just like that stupid caged canary, because it’s the only one she has. Maybe one day she’ll learn another, spread her wings and fly to a new place with new songs, but that day is even further away than that distant friendship-future Felicity keeps imagining. She’s not ready to fly; right now, she can barely even stand, and if clinging to those falsehoods and fabrications is what it takes to keep her on her feet, then Felicity will stay up all damn night to hear her say _“I don’t care”_ a hundred times or more, and never even look at the clock.

So, instead of calling her bluff, instead of giving voice to any of those truths that hurt more than they help, she just nods and smiles and lets Laurel have the win she so desperately needs.

“Okay,” she says again. “We can play it that way. Anything you want, Laurel. We can—”

“Don’t.” For the first time, Laurel almost straightens up; she looks like Felicity has just struck her, like she’s single-handedly reopened every wound on her face. “Don’t say that. Don’t.” She shakes her head, urgent in a way that Felicity hasn’t seen in her all night; if she wasn’t so taken aback it would almost be reassuring. “It’s not… I wasn’t…”

She stops there, and Felicity frowns her confusion. “Wasn’t what?” she asks, when Laurel makes it clear she needs some prompting.

“ _Playing_.” It’s a confession, cracked and fragile. “I know. I know you were talking about something else. I know you weren’t talking about… about this. I know it’s just a figure of speech. I know all that, so save your breath. But it doesn’t… it doesn’t matter. It’s not important.” Her face is streaked with tears again, salt searing the wounds, and Felicity cannot tear her gaze away from those painful swollen eyes. “I just… I wanted you to know. I needed you to know that I wasn’t playing out there tonight. I swear. I wasn’t just trying to be some big bad vigilante, dressing up in Sara’s jacket and playing Canary. I wasn’t… I’d never… I…”

“I know.” Felicity swallows, forces down a flurry of feeling. “I know that, Laurel. I mean, I know we don’t know each other super-well or anything, but I get it. I do. You don’t have to explain it to me.”

“I know I don’t.” She’s biting her lip again, and it looks so painful, so brutal, that Felicity leans in to rest her thumb against the place where it’s swelling, between her teeth and the bruises, soothing as best she can. Laurel doesn’t turn away like she expects; she lets it happen, lets her touch her if only for a moment, and when she speaks again Felicity is sure that she can feel the pain throbbing through the wound in overheated waves. “But I wanted to say it anyway.”

Felicity smiles, relishes the flicker of honesty. “I get that,” she says. “Believe me.”

She lets her hand linger for a beat or two, lets Laurel take what she wants from it, comfort or the sting of fresh new pain, whatever she needs to get through the next few breaths. Laurel’s eyes are half-closed, but there’s something almost peaceful about the way she’s swaying now, like she knows it’s almost over, like she can see the end at last, as clearly as Felicity can. She would never admit to being exhausted, of course, much less anything else, but Felicity can see that her body is as desperate for that safe, comfortable hospital bed as she is for getting her there. She’s on the brink of collapse, Felicity can tell, from the pain and the grief and the self-loathing, from all the things that have been slowing wearing her down ever since she threw herself at someone twice her size.

Not that she’d admit it, but Felicity actually kind of likes the sight of her like this. She doesn’t often get to see Oliver in this state, so exhausted he can barely stand, glassy-eyed and with his defences drooping. She doesn’t often get to see any weakness in him at all, but when she does it feels more like trust than a thousand murmured confessions in the heat of a passionate moment, a thousand blurted-out secrets in a moment when he thinks he’s going to die. It means everything, this moment of absolute surrender, and she didn’t think it was possible for a moment like that to mean more than it does with Oliver, but looking at Laurel now, it’s pretty close.

“Come on,” she says, pulling away with a reluctance that feels almost physical. “We’re almost there now. Let’s get you inside.”

“Yeah.” The word is hazy, almost involuntary, and she shakes herself free of it almost before it’s fully formed. She shakes her head to clear it, dizzy and disoriented, and catches Felicity by the arm as she moves towards the old familiar sliding doors. “I mean, no. Wait.” 

The urgency is contagious, and Felicity stops in her tracks without a moment’s hesitation. “What is it?” she asks, grimacing at the sting of sharp nails across her skin.

“Nothing. Everything. Nothing.” She swallows, looking frightened; she’s running on empty, almost spent, but she’s closer to lucid than she’s been all night. “It’s just… you have to do something for me. I know I’ve asked a lot of favours from you today, and I know you’ve gone above and beyond the call of whatever duty Ollie’s got you doing just by getting me here. I know I’m not… I know I’m not easy to deal with right now. I know I’m not rational. And I know you… you, with your computers and your hacking and your pinging… I know that rational is important to people like you, but…”

“It’s okay,” Felicity says; her throat is getting a little sore from all the times she’s said that. “You know I’m here to help. And you don’t… no-one’s expecting you to be rational, Laurel. No-one’s expecting you to be anything. You’re the only one with expectations.”

“Don’t.” Her teeth are on her lip again, sharp and white.

Felicity, of course, backs down immediately; for all her lack of tact, she knows a fragile moment when she’s thrown into the middle of one. “Okay,” she says. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Laurel swallows, closes her eyes. Her breathing is ragged, rattling in her lungs like another beating, and Felicity wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she calms down, until she can talk sense, until she can breathe without adding to her pain. She wants to tell her that it’s not important, that nothing is, that the only thing that matters is her not hating herself. She wants to prise those sharp white teeth away from the lip, wants to take her hands and stop her from doing any more damage to herself. She wants to do so much for her, wants to do anything for her, but she knows it wouldn’t do any good.

Just like her body, the parts of Laurel that are broken and dented inside need to heal themselves in their own time. All that anger, the violence, the hatred, the self-destruction… it needs to burn itself out before she can become the person she so desperately wants to. It’s not enough that she can’t let go of Sara, can’t let go of her jacket or her identity; she can’t do right by anyone if she can’t see past her own self-loathing. That’s not something Felicity can help her with; honestly, it’s not even something Oliver can. It’s something she needs to work out for herself, a path she needs to carve in her own footsteps. She needs to figure out what it means, Sara’s name and her jacket, needs to figure out what it stands for, what _she_ stands for. She doesn’t need to be a bird of prey, or even a canary in a cage. She just needs to be _Laurel_. And she’s the only one who can make that happen.

For now, though, Felicity can be here. She can help her to stay upright, can support her, can cup her face, slide her thumb between her teeth and her lip, can keep the self-destruction at bay until she has time to think it through. She can do little things, and maybe that won’t make it easier, but at least she can help Laurel to stop making it harder.

“What do you need?” she asks, wincing as Laurel’s teeth snap against the edge of her thumb, reflexive and urgent.

“You have to make sure…” She bites down once more, then pulls away. “Make sure they don’t give me anything.”

It takes Felicity an embarrassingly long moment to figure out what she’s trying to say, what she’s asking, and when the realisation hits it lands like a blow, hard and powerful.

 _No drugs_. That’s what she’s saying. _No drugs, no pills, no painkillers. No chance of a relapse._

That’s not all, though. She’s also saying, _‘I trust you with my sobriety. I trust you to help me swallow my demons. I trust you to help me keep those parts of me at bay.’_ She’s saying, _‘I’m not strong enough to fight for myself tonight, and I trust you to fight for me.’_

She’s saying, _‘I trust you.’_

It’s an intimacy that goes so far beyond anything Felicity would have thought her capable of, and for once she’s at a loss for words.

Laurel’s struggle with addiction is no secret to anyone who’s met her. Felicity is pretty low down on her list of acquaintances, but even she knows the dirty details of what she went through, how hard the thing hit and how hard she had to fight to drag herself back out of it. It’s all too easy to judge someone for falling into a position like that in the first place, she knows, but not so easy to see the hurt underneath, the heartbreak and the horror that leads someone down a path they already know is treacherous. Laurel knew what addiction looked like long before she fell prey to it; she saw it in her father every day for years. But it’s hard to think about what you know when all you know is what you feel.

Addiction isn’t like an ill-advised altercation in a back-alley; Felicity doesn’t know much about it, but she knows that. Once it’s in you, it’s in you for life; there’s no shortcut, no victory lap, and it never ends. Laurel has made some horrible mistakes in her life — and tonight’s little adventure most definitely counts among that number — but she makes them right in the end. It’s been a long time now since she cleaned herself up, since she broke the cycle and got sober; it’s a really, really long time, and it seems even longer. Looking at her now, or at least a ‘now’ that came before tonight, it’s easy to forget where she came from, how far she fell and what she did to herself. It’s easy to think recovery is a cure, but it’s not.

Moments like this bring the whole thing back to the forefront, make the past present again, a howl of memory crying out in Surround Sound, a blaze of memory that they’d all sooner forget. Felicity has the benefit of forgetting, of seeing now!Laurel and imagining future!Laurel, pretending that past!Laurel is gone and buried. Laurel doesn’t have that luxury. Past!Laurel is always there, always right behind her, breathing down her neck, as dark and deadly as any back-alley altercation, and a whole lot more permanent than a few broken bones. She’s real, and she is forever.

This isn’t the first time Felicity has seen that side of her, the side that remembers, the side that’s so afraid of falling back down into the darkness. She’s seen flickers of it here and there in the Foundry. Laurel doesn’t have a reason to be there, not really, but it seems to keep her calm, keep her focused, and sometimes she’ll hang around down there just to keep from going home. Maybe that should be a klaxon in itself, but Oliver figures, so long as she’s there, she’s not in a bar. Still, though, the shadows are still there, and it’s not exactly subtle, the way she lets in those moments of weakness, half-joking mutters of _“God, I need a drink,”_ or tremors in her hands and shoulders when she turns away in the middle of a sentence. Felicity’s gotten pretty good at picking out the bad days, at seeing the bruise-coloured circles under her eyes and knowing why they’re there, what a sleepless night means for an addict. She’s seen it before, definitely, but it’s never felt so raw or so visceral as it does now.

Laurel’s standing there, beaten and bloody and damn near broken; she’s weaker than Felicity has ever seen her, and she doesn’t even have the strength left to pretend that she’s not. That’s the saddest part, the part that hurts the most: she doesn’t even have the strength to pretend. Laurel prides herself on her strength above all else, even her integrity; she’s come through horrible things, again and again and again, but she hasn’t come through this. Tomorrow, she might, but looking at her right now that might as well be a lifetime away. A bad decision, a stupid idea, a back-alley altercation gone horribly wrong, and here she is. Here _they_ are, the two of them. Because, yeah, Felicity’s here too; she’s part of this too, seeing it, watching it, being a part of it in her own small way.

And maybe she doesn’t know Laurel like Oliver does, maybe she hasn’t learned the hidden things that he knows like the back of his hand… but then, Oliver hasn’t seen this either.

He hasn’t seen this Laurel, the one who can’t even stand without help, in so much pain she can’t even pretend she doesn’t care. He hasn’t seen the criss-crossing of blood, the mottling of bruises. He hasn’t seen the swollen blood-bruises of her lip, the flash of her teeth as she bites down, the gashes carved into her forehead or the weight of her fists as she slashes across open wounds to wipe away the tears that he also never saw. He didn’t see the way she pressed her cheek into the ground, not caring about infection, not caring about anything but turning her face away, hiding herself, punishing herself. He didn’t see the way she did it then, in that horrible back-alley with its gravel and its dirt and its broken glass, and he doesn’t see the way she does it again now, turning her eyes towards the garish neon hospital sign, blinding and dazzling and all the more so for someone with a head injury, with blunt-force trauma swelling her vision down to a narrow point. He hasn’t seen the way she embraces the suffering, embraces the discomfort, embraces everything as she turns away from the one person in the world who is here, the one person who has no choice but to see all those things, to see everything, to see _her_.

Felicity sees her. She sees the pain, the fear, the weakness. She sees the strength that brought her here and the hole inside it left behind. She sees the woman who needed so desperately to do good that she let it shatter her, let it leave her broken and bleeding in a back-alley. She sees the addict who paid the price for feeling too much, who still pays that price every day, every hour, every minute, every second. She sees the grieving older sister who just wants justice for a life taken too soon, and the self-destructive creature who thinks that the only way she’ll be worth something is to emulate someone else. She sees the caged canary with its clipped wings, the little yellow blip that stopped moving, and she sees the bird of prey, a huntress in flight. She sees it all. She sees _Laurel_. The good and the bad and, yeah, the downright ugly. Truly and completely, she sees her.

“Felicity?”

She comes back to herself with a start; Laurel’s finally looking at her, actually looking directly at her, for what might just be the first time since she showed up here. Her eyes are still hazy, and it doesn’t take a doctor to recognise that they’re not really focused, but at least she’s making the effort now. It’s that important to her, she’ll even make eye-contact. The gesture is a tiny one, but it says so much, and what can Felicity do but nod and smile and touch her face, the bruises and the swelling? What else can she do but take her weight when the pain and the exhaustion take her, when Laurel stumbles against her, body sprawling, face warm and throbbing against her palm? What else can she do but keep her safe, not from little red blips or back-alley altercations, but from the parts of herself that still have sway over her? What else can she do but help her to hold the self-destruction at bay, help her to hold on to the parts of herself that Sara cherished? What else can she do but let her know that she understands, that she’s here, that she won’t ever have to go into another fight alone?

“Of course,” she whispers. “Of course I can do that.”

After all, she thinks, isn’t that what friends are for?


End file.
